


How To Be Without

by wind_blow_backwards



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27188329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wind_blow_backwards/pseuds/wind_blow_backwards
Summary: Just a sad little fic following Dina in the days after Ellie left. Organising things, sorting stuff out, feeling what she needs to feel.
Relationships: Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	How To Be Without

Dina gave herself a minute. While her eyes were shut, Ellie could still theoretically be there. She could still have gotten to the gate, realised what an asshole she was being, and shamefacedly snuck back in. She could be cooking an apology breakfast right now, which Dina could eat with narrowed eyes, pretending to be angrier than she was. So long as Ellie was still here, Dina could still forgive her. And so long as Dina could still forgive her, they could still be a family. So long as Dina's eyes stayed closed. 

Dina opened her eyes. 

The room still felt like theirs. She'd been sweating in her sleep, but the sheets around her were cool. Light traced in around the edges of the white curtains, and she began to register the sounds of the morning. Moved by a sudden surge of panic, Dina swung out of bed and rushed to the crib. No, it was okay; J.J. was still here. 

It wasn't that Dina had worried that Ellie had taken him; she knew she'd never do that. It was more a defence against the dream-logic of J.J. having somehow grown fully up in the course of the night, taken after his mom, and deciding to leave too. But it would be a while until this sleeping snotball could do anything like that. She softly touched his tummy, and he murmured. 

Numbed and practical, Dina did her chores. Fed the animals, fed J.J., collected the eggs. Checked the perimeter fence, washed and hung up some clothes, milked Flo. Fetched water, fed herself, pulled up some weeds that were getting too close to the carrots. Only when all of that was done (when, on an ordinary day, she might have moved on to some of the less-critical chores), did she sit in her armchair in the living room, lightly bouncing J.J. on her knee, and think. 

She couldn't stay here; that was obvious. It was too much work for one person, and without Ellie, their life here didn't make sense anymore. Without Ellie, it suddenly seemed foolhardy to raise a kid out here when the safety-in-numbers of Jackson was so close at hand. Without Ellie - 

Without Ellie. 

She was sobbing, gasping in shuddering breaths, trying to set J.J. down before she upset him too much. The thing that kept pounding in Dina's head – and she knew it was 'wrong'; she'd berate herself for it later – was that she'd _failed_. She hadn't been enough. J.J. hadn't been enough. She was a failure and now her life was gone. 

J.J. was crying too by now, but Dina couldn't summon anything other than a half-hearted "Shh," not moving from her crumpled position on the armchair. She imagined her mother brusquely wiping away her tears and taking J.J. in her arms, and felt even more alone. Her mother – so strong and brilliant and paranoid – would have found some way to avoid this. She wouldn't have relied on love to do the job of discipline. 

But what was she supposed to do, hogtie Ellie up in the barn? Pen her in with the sheep and herd her back in at night? This was her choice, and there was no making it for her. Ellie had decided to leave, and was almost certainly going to be killed, and it was Dina's fault for not being able to get Ellie to love her more, but – and this 'but' was the only thing stopping her from falling all the way down that hideous spiral – it was done. She couldn't change it. Everything was ruined, but she had to find something for J.J. that wasn't. 

"We bury our dead quickly," her mother used to tell her. When she said stuff like that, Dina had never been totally sure whether she meant 'our family' or 'Jews'. Being the only Jewish people around, the distinction had never meant very much to them. It didn't matter now. 

Straightening her back, Dina methodically wiped the tears off her face. She picked up a shirt that Ellie had left on the couch, folded it neatly. She would bury her dead quickly. 

.

Dina threw herself into organising. She spent the morning making lists, then rode into Jackson and dropped JJ off with his grandfolks while she made the arrangements. The hardest was the animals. She knew the butcher, Jay, would eagerly take them, but she wanted to see if anyone might be willing to extend them a little more life than that. And she wanted to do it without raising too many questions about why she was downsizing the farm.

As Dina made her way through Jackson, her demeanour was calibrated to a lethal cheerfulness. She slapped backs, cracked jokes, and made gregarious small-talk with people she barely knew. She sensed that she was overdoing it, but she couldn't stop. It felt like if she tried to tone the cheerfulness down, it'd disappear entirely. A hamfisted parody is easier to pull off than a subtle one. 

She managed to sell two lambs and a ewe by 3 o'clock: all to different people, so her reasons for selling weren't scrutinised. The rest she regretfully sold to Jay, mumbling something about going in a different direction with the farm. It was the first crack in her gladhanding cheeriness all day, and Jay definitely noticed. He didn't pry, but also didn't haggle with her as much as he normally would, which made Dina flush with a disproportionate humiliation. If there was one thing she was dreading above all in moving back to Jackson, it was people feeling sorry for her. She was just trying to put it off as long as possible. 

The only people whose reaction she was truly confident in were Susan and Robin. Jesse's elderly parents had been unbelievably good to Dina through every stage of her and Jesse's relationship, and they knew how to hold a generous silence. She had sometimes thought – privately – that she might have broken up with Jesse months earlier if she hadn't loved his parents so much. Susan was an insta-mother to everybody she encountered, warm and tough, who'd ushered Dina wholly into the family while she and Jesse were still in the 'awkward teen fumblings' stage of things. Robin was a spry, perceptive, sunsoaked old gardener, who you sometimes forgot was in the room until he'd slyly come out with the funniest thing anyone had said all night. Their grief for Jesse was immense, in what struck Dina as direct proportion to their luminous adoration of JJ. When Dina came back to their house in the late afternoon, she found them playing with him, as she knew she would.

One clear upside, at least. 

"Hey," Dina said, realising as she said it that her reserves of cheeriness had been completely depleted. "The little monster been any trouble?" 

"No, no, he's been a dream," Susan said, sweeping over and kissing Dina's forehead. Her brow crinkled. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I just ... need to ask you something," Dina said, deciding to rip the bandage off quickly, sitting down on the edge of the flowery sofa. "You know how you've offered a few times to have us move in with you?" 

They reiterated some version of this offer every time she spoke. Now, though, they were wary, sensing that something must have happened. JJ was burbling happily on Robin's knee, oblivious. Dina closed her eyes and said the rest very quickly. 

"Ellie's left. Again." Dina's voice wobbled, but she ploughed on. "Gone after that woman again, the one who ... anyway. We can't stay at the farm anymore, and I figured the best place for JJ and me would be here, with you. You've offered to have us live with you so many times, I know it almost became a joke after a while, so I don't want to assume, but how would you feel about that? I know you want to be near JJ, and I'd obviously pull my weight when it comes to-"

Dina couldn't get through any more, as Susan had engulfed her in a ferocious hug. 

"OF COURSE YOU CAN STAY!" The words were muffled to Dina's ears, pressed as she was against Susan's chest, but the embrace was essentially the message. Susan babbled enthusiastically as Dina just closed her eyes and smelled her blouse. Grass cuttings and elderflower. After a time, Susan held herself out from Dina, still holding onto her by the shoulders. "Do you ... you're obviously not ..."

"No," Dina confirmed. "I'm not going with her."

"Because of JJ," Susan said.

"Because of JJ." Dina exhaled. "And because I think it's a bad idea. I tried to talk her out of it, but she ... she left." 

Dina felt like the word 'left' was reverberating around the room. It had a different resonance now than the first time she'd said it. Thicker. Colder. Susan nodded, understanding but needing to confirm. 

"And if ... when do you think she might be back?"

Dina swallowed. She could tell the dam was about to be breached. 

"I have to assume she won't." 

. 

They didn't talk much more about it that night. Dina had broken down, Susan had insisted on soup and sleep, and it was only in the morning that Dina was able to get her bearings. The 'maybe things will be okay if I don't open my eyes' trick wasn't working anymore. Her eyes were still closed, but she knew where she was. 

Every time she thought of Ellie, her mind flashed unbidden images of horror. She didn't know how to make it stop. Ellie being swarmed and torn apart by clickers. Ellie being shot in the gut and slowly bleeding to death, gasping at the base of a tree. Ellie having her throat slit by a demonic and triumphant Abby. There were ten thousand ways for Ellie to die out there, and in the absence of any certainty, it felt to her like they were all happening at once. 

'Ellie is dead because I couldn't make her love me enough,' she thought dully, as though reciting facts for a test. 'That's just what happened. Ellie is dead because of me. Ellie is dead because nobody will ever love me as much as I love them, and all my love has ever meant is that that person is gonna die, and if I were enough then she wouldn't be dead, but she is, which means that I'm nothing. Ellie is dead because I'm nothing.' 

Dina opened her eyes. 

She must have slept for at least 12 hours; sun was already flooding the room. The sky-blue curtains had been drawn, and a glass of water placed next to the bed. 

What even _was_ this feeling? Dina stared at a crack in the plaster above her. The trails of toxic thinking she could identify. It didn't stop them from feeling true, but she could at least recognise that if a friend were saying them, she'd push back on them as being ridiculous. 'Except for me it's true, so' - ugh. She was going to be on this merry-go-round for a long time, and she was already nauseous from it. 

Dina turned over and scrunched her face into the pillow. The main thing she was feeling, there in the wrong house, fists balled up in the wrong sheets, was that her life had irrevocably slipped from its moorings. Somewhere out there, Dina 1 had convinced Ellie 1 to stay, and Ellie had gotten better, and their life was exactly what it was supposed to be. She had assumed that _she_ was Dina 1, but now the joke was on her. This wouldn't have happened to Dina 1. 

There was something like this in Savage Starlight; she remembered Ellie explaining it to her. What was it? Something about multiple timelines? Somebody found out that they weren't who they thought they were, and they had to stand aside for the 'prime' version of themselves? She couldn't remember the details; Ellie had just been so cute when she explained that stuff. She was so withdrawn and mumbly early on, it was always a treat when you got her onto something where the words just spilled. 

Shit. Now she was thinking of Ellie being _cute_. Dina groaned into the unfamiliar pillow. She wanted to be pissed off, univocally and unilaterally. Being pissed off would be more affirming than being miserable, and thinking about Ellie being cute was a surefire way of making herself miserable. 

Dina's stomach felt like someone had it in a clenched fist. She had to get up. She had to cross things off her list. She had to keep living the wrong life that her failure had made. She knew that last thought wasn't true or fair – to her or to JJ – but 'knowing' wasn't doing a lot for her right now. Right now, there was just this feeling of internal demolition, like her support struts were being dynamited and her screams couldn't be heard above the booms. 

Nothing about this felt right. The pillow, the silence, her stomach – all of it felt sickeningly wrong. _How_ could Ellie have left them? Why the fuck wasn't the first go-around enough? What was left? 

Dina rubbed her eyes, and swung out of bed. 

.

Over the next week, Dina made five trips back and forth from the farm. She made all the deliveries she had to – crying mutely into her sleeve after delivering the sheep to Jay – and gave most of the furniture away. Ellie's stuff, she packed and gathered neatly in her studio. On the off-chance Ellie made it back, Dina didn't want it to seem she'd left in a huff. She wanted it to seem like she was calm, thoughtful, resolute. 

She was a mess. 

Fleeting gasps of anger and hurt, only occasionally breaking the surface of a sea of leaden misery. Extreme diligence at organising, and complete breakdown the instant Dina let herself think about what it actually _was_ that she was organising. After that first night, she hadn't really slept. 

Most things Dina delivered, but a few things people came to get. This was the worst part, Dina discovered, as people couldn't help eyeing everything on their way. When Martin was picking up a bunch of tools, he noticed Ellie's guitar leaned up against a pile of boxes. "Oh shit, a guitar! That up for grabs too?"

Dina's blood ran cold. She quickly said, "No, sorry, that's Ellie's" – and didn't answer his confused look with any further explanation. She knew what he was thinking. If Ellie was gone, wasn't her stuff up for grabs? Wasn't that the whole reason they'd come out there? Dina silently cursed herself. In what little she'd said about Ellie since she returned to Jackson, people seemed to have gotten a pretty firm impression that Ellie wasn't coming back – and that Dina didn't want to talk about it. This was a more comfortable posture than the more ambiguous truth, so Dina had leaned into it. With the downside, she realised now, that people wouldn't understand why they couldn't just have the stuff that Ellie had abandoned. 

Dina was exhausted. Her desire to be alone throbbed at her perversely: wanting to be alone mainly to fully surrender herself to the misery of her aloneness. She couldn't get Martin out of the house fast enough; she couldn't give anybody more than the exact amount of time it took to work out whatever deal or exchange was on the docket. Some friends had asked if she wanted to talk, and Dina had just given them a tight, watery smile and a shake of the head. Eventually, she would. Of course she would. But for now, she had work to do, and that felt like the only thing keeping her alive. 

She hated herself for thinking that. And unlike some of the other thoughts she regularly chastised herself for indulging, she worried that this one might actually be true. 

On the last day at the farm, Dina only had a few tasks left. She was dreading finishing them, but trudged on anyway: sweeping out the empty rooms, straightening up Ellie's things, stuffing the last few straggler bits of clothing into a canvas bag. She hefted the final two bags onto the front porch and paused. Was that it? 

No, not quite. 

She went through the house, taking down all of the mezuzahs. This wasn't a home anymore. 

Holding them in her hand, Dina thought of her mother and felt winded. She sank down on the front porch. She was on her own now, finally, and all she could hear was the the breeze jangling and bending the wheat. The house seemed just as aghast as she felt: gutted and dazed and unable to protest. "Sorry, old girl," she murmured, running a hand along the wood beside her. She knew it wanted to be lived in. 

Dina thought of JJ, and of Susan and Robin, and of how much she still had to be grateful for. The feeling came slow, but she was determined to keep forcing it until it was natural again. She'd been praying a lot recently: mostly for Ellie to be safe, sometimes for Ellie to feel ashamed, and sometimes, in the quietest part of the morning before anyone else was awake, for Ellie to be forgiven. 

In the distance, a wren landed on a fence-post. It was one of the ones they'd put up together on their first proper day here. The wren busied itself in its own feathers for a minute before flying briskly away. Dina felt a pang in her chest for the bird. _Couldn't you stay even a minute longer?_

Dina exhaled raggedly, squeezing her eyes shut. Everything felt tenuous, like the plates beneath the world were sliding. She visualised what she was about to do. She was going to stand, brush the day's dust off her pants, and go inside to fetch her last two bags. She was going to ride home, be careful on the trail, and be back in time to read JJ his favourite bedtime story. She was going to survive this, keep throwing out her love just as recklessly, and make sure that JJ never doubted that he was enough. They were enough. That had to be enough. 

Dina opened her eyes. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first published fanfic. I've written a tiny bit here and there, but never felt up to hitting 'post' before. 
> 
> I'm pretty sure this is all there'll be of this. There's a small chance I might write more (if something particularly occurs to me), but I don't have any ambitions of writing Ellie's return or anything like that. Ultimately, Dina's is just a very particular sadness that resonated a lot with me and that I felt compelled to spend a bit a bit more time in. 
> 
> Note: if after reading this, you're hungry for some lovely Ellie/Dina reconciliation and softness and happy-ever-afterness, I'd heartily recommend acceptabletwig's 'Waiting for Dawn'. Speaking personally, it's exactly what I wanted to read after finishing The Last of Us Part II:  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/24995950/chapters/60521611?view_adult=true 
> 
> This, though, was what I wanted to *write*. A sad visit to some old unfavoured feelings.


End file.
